Cleven "Goodie" Goudeau had a successful advertising business but his true love was in greeting cards and cartooning. The Vallejo artist works out of the Vallejo Artist's Guild. Event on 1/22/04 in Vallejo. MICHAEL MACOR / The Chronicle

Photo: MICHAEL MACOR

Cleven "Goodie" Goudeau had a successful advertising business but...

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Cleven "Goodie" Goudeau had a successful advertising business but his true love was in greeting cards and cartooning. The Vallejo artist works out of the Vallejo Artist's Guild. Event on 1/22/04 in Vallejo. MICHAEL MACOR / The Chronicle

Photo: MICHAEL MACOR

Cleven "Goodie" Goudeau had a successful advertising business but...

PROFILE / Goodie Humor / Cartoonist Cleven Goudeau on making art in a white world

Almost everywhere he goes in downtown Vallejo, people recognize Cleven Goudeau. As he walks past the Empress Theater, a historical landmark he used to visit as a teenager, a woman points him out to her friend and says, "There's Goodie." The debonair and soft-spoken Goudeau, who is wearing a paisley ascot, pressed khakis and a brown blazer, only smiles and offers a slight wave with his poised hello. Then he walks into Mel's Roast to order lunch. While waiting, he strolls into the theater to admire the beautiful cloth seats, the opulent ceiling and the organ at the front -- a relic reminiscent of his younger days.

Back at Mel's, before his tuna sandwich is ready, he wanders into the interior of an adjacent, closed-off room that doubles as a lounge. It's cold and dark, and with its Art Deco furniture and stiff smell of dust, it has the feeling of a bygone era. But Goudeau admires every inch of it. In here, as with the Empress, he examines the tiny, overlooked details.

He knows what to look for, after all, since much of his life's work has been disregarded -- until recently.

After several decades of cartooning, making the first national line of black greeting cards in the country and becoming an award-winning advertising executive and sought-after model, still, "Nobody even knows who I am," Goudeau says, referring to his greeting card company, Goodie Products. "I was the first to bring my line out in a national way. All those other companies came out after me. No one knows that."

But soon they might. A documentary about Goudeau's achievements as a self- taught cartoonist and black greeting card industry pioneer will be independently released this year. His artwork will also be displayed at the Chatterbox Gallery in San Francisco this month, alongside the work of "Wee Pals" creator and Goudeau's one-time mentor, Morrie Turner, 80, and fellow artist Ed Renfro, who is 79. The exhibition will combine the work of the veteran cartoonists with that of up-and-coming artists.

Despite these recent successes, Goudeau tells his life story with a bittersweet tone mixed with nostalgia and pride. "The young kids don't have anyone like me to use as an example, like Michael Jordan," he says. "They don't even know about the greeting card industry. They just don't know."

When he began drawing, Goudeau didn't know either. One day, when he was about 5, he was working alongside his grandfather, a landowner and entrepreneur on a farm in tiny Hillster, Texas, and he took a pencil from his grandfather's hatband and drew a horse on a paper bag. The 1930s didn't produce many black artists; America was in the midst of the Great Depression, and art wasn't a priority. Still, Goudeau learned "all the things it took to make the world" growing up on that farm. By learning about natural resources, he picked up one valuable lesson that would both help and hinder his career. " 'If you plant anything at the right time, it'll bloom' -- and that became my philosophy," Goudeau says. "You find fertile soil and you cultivate it and you make it grow."

As the country entered World War II and jobs became plentiful in Oakland, Goudeau's family migrated to the East Bay, like thousands of other African Americans, and ended up on Seventh Street. There, Goudeau earned the nickname "Goodie" as a scrappy 5-foot, 2-inch sandlot ball player with a knack in elementary and middle school for hitting home runs. Because "no one ever forgets it," and it stuck, Goudeau would use that name his whole life.

Until high school, Goudeau hadn't actively pursued art. But while there, he developed a distinct style, by drawing caricatures of his friends -- drawings that were so well-liked he decided he could make a living in art. He made friends with basketball legend Bill Russell at McClymonds High School, and met his future wife, Jeanette, a reserved, round-faced beauty he has been married to for 53 years.

But in 1953, full-time black artists weren't exactly in vogue. Goudeau took a job as a storekeeper at the Oakland Naval Supply Center and sketched on the sides of boxes. By chance, a colleague noticed one of his drawings and ran it by an editor at the Oak Leaf, the center's weekly newsletter. Goudeau went on to develop "Centerrites," a series of glib but edited depictions of working life there -- with all white characters -- in his spare time.

That fall, Oakland Tribune editor Leo Levy invited the budding cartoonist to the newspaper to offer him a job. But when Goudeau showed up, he was met with disbelief. Levy said there had been a mistake. They didn't hire Negroes.

"It had nothing to do with my talent, it was just my color. I knew that," Goudeau said. "I wasn't stupid, even at 19."

He was also undeterred. "You don't let (racism) make you bitter; let it make you better."

Goudeau returned to work at the Supply Center, where his strip started to gain him local notoriety. When his mother was hospitalized and diagnosed with cancer several years later, a simple gesture took his talent in another direction. He couldn't find a "Get Well" card his mother would like, so he made her one: a bright yellow studio card featuring a worried-looking black woman in a hospital gown.

His mom, nurses and patients raved about the card, which, although it was cute and funny, was also a novelty. At the time, no major greeting card companies were making cards with black subjects. Inspired by the positive reaction he received, Goudeau started his own line of "Goodie Cards." He began small, with a few designs so he could practice learning to draw black people (he had used his mother's face as a template for that first card). He had no example for how to design a black contemporary greeting card; other than the one he created, he'd never seen one. The scope of what he wanted to do, he says, was a "huge responsibility." He viewed it as his chance "to create something indicative of a whole people."

While working at the Naval Supply Center, he published his first cartoon in Playboy. It featured the same white characters from his Oak Leaf strip and won him an award. But his true love was in Goodie Products, the cards he sold to local specialty stores in 1966. They featured black people, with large Afros wearing contemporary clothing -- polyester shirts or bell bottoms, for example -- and sometimes echoing sentiments of black pride, referring to women as "Soul Sisters" in the colloquial terms that were increasingly popular in what was then called the Negro community.

But some blacks thought his cards were derogatory, and whites thought they were too radical. Some Black Panthers took his cards and trampled them outside a store, thinking that a white company was trying to make money off of the "Black is Beautiful" sentiment echoing throughout the black community. Goudeau was denied a $50,000 loan to expand his business by white investors and printers that refused to make Goodie Products.

" 'Who's gonna buy that?' " Goudeau recalls naysayers snorting at him. "No one knew how to promote my product, it was a new thing. It had no rules, no standards, no nothing. For the first time in America, you had a black man going out into a white world selling a black product. I was trying to open a door in the industry. I figured if there were any significant African Americans anywhere, they'd be in the marketplace, but they weren't there. [Black people] didn't have birthdays? We didn't have anniversaries? What a mistake. What are we, 20 million black people in this country?"

Goudeau met "Wee Pals" creator Morrie Turner -- the first African American syndicated cartoonist in America -- in the late '60s. The world of black artists was so small that for 12 years they were the only black members of the Northern California Cartoon and Humor Association. With Turner's mentoring and encouragement, Goudeau created a strip of his own for the Berkeley Post called "Soul Folks," and forged ahead with his plan to make greeting cards.

In 1968, Goudeau found an investor in Irwin Miller Trust and left the Supply Center to run his business in New York. He would pursue his national plan, though the odds were not in his favor. Then, the greeting-card industry was an $800 million annual enterprise. Nationally, there were four major greeting card companies and none of them were making ethnic cards.

"Being an artist, I thought I could make the wrong thing right," Goudeau says. "I did everything I could; I thought the greeting card industry was missing the boat. Why couldn't I go to the grocery store and buy a card about my race of people? Nobody who made greeting cards thought enough of us to honor us in that manner. I didn't wait for someone else to do it, I did it."

When Goudeau became the co-founder and executive creative director of Onyx Enterprises Inc. in 1968, it was the only company producing black and white greeting cards nationally. Reaction to his cards, which ranged from goofy and sweet to insightful and almost political, was mixed.

"Most black folks would never believe a black man did this," Goudeau says. "Even my own people didn't understand what I was doing. They'd ask 'Why do you want to be funny?' I would say, 'Because I want to be normal.' I'm not Huey Newton or Martin Luther King Jr. -- I'm Goodie."

Eventually, Goudeau got tired of disappointing sales and marketing complications. He left the greeting card business in 1973. "There were too many problems ... things that I couldn't do anything about," he says. "When a poor man comes along, he can't do what a rich man does. I got nothing from Hallmark or Norcross ... I only got criticism. Why is this black man doing cards about black pride when he knows that these are taboo? I got nothing for doing it. If anything, I always have to prove myself."

By then, he was 43 and the father of four daughters. He was weary and his health wasn't good, but he decided to go back to school to study art. After graduating from Columbia University and Pratt Institute, he worked at the Marschalk Company, a reputable advertising agency that is also part of the Interpublic Group of Agencies. Within a few years, he became a senior art director at McCann-Erickson. In 1982, he won the prestigious Clio advertising award, and his work graced the pages of Time and Newsweek.

"In the advertising world, with all sorts of lunatics running rampant, he was one of the nicest people you'd want to meet," says Victor Gellineau, a greeting-card entrepreneur who worked with Goodie in advertising during the 1980s. "No super ego, just nice. He was very talented and just a genuine person."

As accomplished as Goudeau had become, he encouraged Victor and his wife, Carole, when the couple sought advice on how to start their own black greeting card line. The Gellineaus began their Connecticut company, Carole Joy Creations, in 1985. When they created their line, they were still faced with challenges from the greeting card industry. Major players in the industry still wondered whether ethnic cards would ever make money. It was as if Goudeau hadn't broken down any barriers at all.

"Hallmark and the others would go on record saying that there was no market for black cards and they'd deny the black market," says Victor Gellineau. Then, scoffing, he adds, "I put three kids through college with my greeting cards."

More than returning to what was now a profitable business, Goudeau was determined to prove his point. When he retired from advertising in 1988, he created a line called Black Silhouettes. By then, Hallmark had introduced Mahogany -- its line of black greeting cards -- and dozens of small black card companies had started up around the country. (Before that, there were roughly a dozen -- but many of them folded in the '70s.) Hallmark and American Greetings now own about 90 percent of the businesses' market share and the industry generates $7.5 billion annually.

The timing seemed right for Black Silhouettes, and Goudeau says the success of his final line would be "determined by the cash register." Then, in 1992 while he was designing another card, Goudeau had a heart attack and had to have quadruple bypass surgery. After a 12-day coma, he took time off to rest. Once he recovered, he decided to become a mentor and teach art and entrepreneurship at the Institute for Youth Entrepreneurship in Harlem. When Jeanette's mother became ill two years ago, the Goudeaus moved back to the Bay Area.

"Most of my friends are surprised at what I've done," Goudeau says. "I've been an artist my whole life -- it's all I've ever done -- and that's a unique thing for a black person."

Would he do it all again? Maybe. If the conditions were right, he says.

Now, he sells his paintings: an array of watercolors, portraits of jazz musicians, caricatures and cartoons. He teaches and spends time with his family, sometimes visiting with them in his studio. But the industry he worked hard to change still does not acknowledge him as a pioneer.

A spokeswoman with the Greeting Card Association of America, a group that represents more than 280 greeting card companies across the country, says that the first known national African American greeting card lines were developed in the 1980s. If that's true, was it possible that Goudeau was the first African American to start a national line of black greeting cards? A GCA insider answered, in an e-mail: "His claim is way out there. No way is he the first unless he has been doing business for the past 20 years under a rock and no one has ever heard of him?!?!?"

T.J. Walkup, an artist who met Goudeau while working next door to him at the Artists' Guild, believes that Goodie was the first. And Walkup, 33, an artist and filmmaker, is making a documentary about Goudeau called "Goodie: Outlining An Invisible Man."

"His whole career is under the radar. No one has done what he has done," Walkup says.

"He's like a great, positive infection; a shot of reality with a whole lot of sugar. He makes life good for a lot of people, just by him inspiring them."

Walkup, a stout, friendly guy who wears a black beret and calls himself a "low-budget" producer, has dedicated himself to making "a place for [Goodie] where he belongs in graphic arts history." A man like Goudeau, he says, should be more revered as an innovator.

"For their own pride and understanding, blacks should know who he is and how important his work is," Walkup says. "It's something we should all celebrate. His work will continue to achieve things long after we've all departed this earth."

In Goudeau's quaint studio, complete with large piles of black portfolios filled with newspaper and magazine clippings, he and Walkup are usually chatty and share a mutual appreciation for each others' work.

"I'm just so surprised that someone outside of my culture would see the importance of what I tried to do," Goudeau says of Walkup. "I just want my people to know that I wanted to do something for them. It wasn't about the money. I wanted them to be able to go somewhere and get something indicative of them."

Goudeau's rise and fall in the greeting-card industry was dictated by things beyond his control: poor timing, a premature vision of the world and a society designed to view art and artists through a racial prism instead of one fashioned by natural talent.

None of that matters now, Goudeau says. He is bent on being a role model to the young people he mentors and teaches in Vallejo. He may not be as well- known to this generation of young people as many basketball players or movie stars, but he is content with his subtle version of bling-bling: a gold palette ring resplendent with rhinestones that he wears on his left hand.

Ultimately, he asserts with a sly grin, "I create things that can't be denied." History suggests that he's right.

"The Cartoon Show," a group art exhibition featuring Cleven Goudeau, Ed Renfro, Morrie Turner, T.J. Walkup and others, opens with a free reception from 4-7 p.m. Saturday at the Chatterbox Gift Gallery, 1185 Church St., San Francisco. The exhibition runs through May 3. For more information, contact Julie Andersen at (415) 647-0900 or jillee@earthlink.net.